Purple Insider - a Minnesota Vikings and NFL podcast - Offensive innovators and the legend of Daunte Culpepper

Episode Date: June 5, 2020

The episode opens with a look at Daunte Culpepper's  crazy stats, what made him so entertaining and why the Vikings didn't win more during his time. Matthew and Eric then discuss why the Vikings' offense was ahead of the curve last year and where they could repeat the good things they did as well as some possible areas for regression. Does Kirk Cousins have to be even better this year? Check out Matthew Coller's written work at PurpleInsider.substack.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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with Drizzly or Instacart, Coors Brewing Company, Golden, Colorado, and as always, celebrate! Hey everybody, welcome into another episode of Purple Insider. Matthew Collar with you. And I want to remind you to go to purpleinsider.com. That's where you can subscribe to all of my written work covering the Minnesota Vikings. And if you could rate and review this podcast, that would be a major, major help. It allows other Vikings fans to find this podcast when they go searching and type in Vikings in whatever podcast app they're using. If you rate and review, this will be the first

one that comes up. So it is greatly appreciated. All right, now we welcome into the show from Pro Football Focus and the PFF Forecast podcast, Eric Eager. What is going on, Eric? Not much, man. Just hanging out in Cincinnati here, hoping and praying that all of you are safe. Yeah, same here. And so there's a lot I want to get to with you. You've written some incredibly in-depth pieces about the NFL at large,

including about offensive coordinators and changes of systems and innovators and things like that. I want to get to that. But you, as a Minnesotan and someone who grew up as a Vikings enthusiast, I think would appreciate what I wrote about at Purple Insider this week is an appreciation article for Dante Culpepper. And I just want to, before we dive into it, throw out some numbers about Dante Culpepper 2000 to 2004, because I'm not sure that everyone remembers how great Dante Culpepper was for those years. He was, in 2000-2004, number three in quarterback rating, number three in touchdowns, number three in touchdowns, number three in yards,

and number one in quarterback rushing yards. And Pro Football Reference has a kind of a wins-above-replacement type statistic they call approximate value. And during those years, the only player with a higher approximate value than Dante Culpepper was Peyton Manning. And the other players on the list, Marvin Harrison, Priest Holmes, Edgerin James, Terrell Owens. I mean, so you have the superstars of the era, and here's Culpepper from 2000 to 2004 being on a different level than them, but the Vikings didn't win a lot, and then he gets hurt just as the Vikings are building up a very strong team

that would ultimately go to the NFC Championship with Brett Favre, Culpepper is looked at, I think, as one of the what if he stays healthy, like one of those classic Vikings what ifs as they continue to build out that team and build a real defense that could have actually taken them somewhere with Culpepper, a quarterback, had he stayed healthy. Yeah, I mean, Dante's a great symbol of a lot of truisms in football. I mean, first off, just even selecting him in the first round of pick 11 in 1999, Randall Cunningham was coming off of an MVP caliber season in 98. He was a little longer in the tooth.

And the Vikings pulled the trigger in that draft. And if people, you know, Vikings pulled the trigger in that draft and if people you know vikings fans will remember in that 1999 draft the the vikings passed up javon curse for dante culpepper and in in 19 and then later on in the draft they went ahead and got demetrius underwood a gentleman who didn't play a snap for the vikings and so early on in 99 the vikings were having a lot of troubles and people were looking back and saying, well, they could have had a really good defensive end in Javon Curse. The Titans are a Super Bowl team. What the heck? And, you know, just a year later, Dennis Green's

team, you know, Dennis Green, who during the course of his Vikings tenure, basically ripped apart the league's best defense and made the league's best offense. Dante comes in, takes the team to 11-5, puts them in the NFC Championship game. And, you know, we all started, you know, thinking about, okay, he's the next big thing. But then what happens? You know, the defense collapsed. A little bit of the offensive line collapsed. Chris Carter loses his fastball.

Now they only have one wide receiver left. Chris Carter loses his fastball. Now they only have one wide receiver left. Dante struggles for a few years. They come in. Mike Tice comes in. Scott Linehan becomes his offensive coordinator. And they have a bunch of great seasons. Now, not very good win-loss record.

I think they topped out at 9-7. But he was legitimately a franchise quarterback for them. And it was all because they took a chance on him early in a season where they didn't, quote, need a quarterback. And I came across some statistics with him that are just absolutely mind-blowing, one of them being that he had the highest percentage of great games of any quarterback during his peak, that 20% of his games he had a quarterback rating higher than 120. And the only guy that's anywhere close is Peyton Manning. So for that section, if you were talking about just like every four years naming who are the best players, who are the best quarterbacks or making an all whatever last four or five years team, I guess 2000 to 2004 is five

years. It would have been Dante Culpepper and Peyton Manning as your quarterbacks. And I look at it as he was certainly flawed in some of the things that he had problems with fumbles, holding on the ball too much. I guess he didn't have the biggest hands was always a conversation about Dante Culpepper. Big body, small hands. But when it came to the big plays that often define how successful you are as Big body, but small hands. and it's just sort of mind-blowing how explosive and exciting they were during that time. But also, as you mentioned, they didn't have the defense at that point,

and Culpepper's shortcomings would often show up in maybe the wrong times. And there's another part of it, too, that might be overlooked about his win-loss record, but the quarterbacks for the Packers at that point were pretty good. And he went 3-6 against the Packers, and all six losses are by one score. So, I mean. They lost, in 2004, they lost both games to Green Bay 34-31 in the regular season. And then Dante played one of the best games in Vikings history

against the Packers in the playoffs, and they won 31-17 because Brett Favre threw four or five interceptions. It was absolutely what you said. Dante was capable of great things, and back then that was more of what made for a good quarterback. Now we expect these guys to be great every single game because the league is so conducive to passing. But in the early 2000s, where Dante really shined was that he remember opening day of

2004 he threw five touchdowns against the Dallas Cowboys uh I think that season he had like three or four games alone where he threw for five touchdowns uh you know and he was capable of that and he was also capable of being absolutely horrendous in 05 you know once they got rid of Randy Moss via the trade, and he wasn't able to face those box one coverages, in the first two games of the season, he had one rushing touchdown, eight turnovers, and they scored one offensive touchdown in those games. So it was really interesting.

The big question I always have is how much of Dante's career was tangled up with Randy Moss? Because he threw for 4,700 yards, and I was saying after the next four years combined, he threw for less than that after Moss was traded to Oakland. So it's a really interesting question, but I do think he is somebody that we don't, as people who have watched the Vikings for a long time, appreciate nearly as much as we should. I think that he's the perfect quarterback for Randy Moss, because I was watching the highlight re perfect quarterback for Randy Moss because, you know,

I was watching the highlight reels of their touchdowns together, and there is one particular throw that looks like the Tech Mobile video game because on the Tech Mobile video game, there's no limit to how far the quarterback can throw the ball. So if you run around with the quarterback and then just push the button, he'll throw it 100 yards if you wait long enough. And that is what this throw looks like from Dante Culpepper, that if they had still been doing those quarterback competitions in Hawaii before the Pro Bowl, I think Dante would have won them all with his arm strength. And to have the

perfect combination of somebody who had great deep accuracy and could launch it as far as you ever wanted to throw it, to go along with one of the great deep receivers, if not the all-time greatest deep receiver in the NFL, was just the perfect combination. It's sort of like talking about Montana and Jerry Rice, where Jerry Rice is the all-time route runner and the most precise receiver, and then you have the most precise quarterback with timing and footwork and all those things.

I think that the Culpepper Moss, they played off of each other. Sure, Moss could make anybody good, but they took it to a different level at that time statistically. Yeah, 100%. I think – and the great thing about Culpepper, you know, what was, you know, part of his downfall as well was, you know, early on when he was the quarterback, you know, they had – I, Randall McDaniel and Jeff Christie had left, but they had Matt Burke.

They had Todd Stusey. They had Corey Stringer. They had David Dixon. And as the seasons progressed, the offensive line got progressively worse, and so did the receiving core. They went from Moss Carter-Reed to Moss Carter-Mat, Matthew Hatchett, I think. And then it was, you know, Dwayne Bates, Nate Burleson, who actually is a very good commentator, wasn't as good of a receiver back then.

And then they finally gave him some support in 04 with, you know, Mike Rosenthal was the right tackle. Brian McKinney was a draft pick. They got Marcus Robinson and Jermaine Wiggins, and we saw it all explode on offense that year. They were the NFL's leading yard-gaining offense, but then in 05, you know, Matt Burke sits out with a hip hernia. Moss gets traded. You know, all that kind of stuff. Michael Bennett gets hurt, and you know, the whole thing crumbles around him, so I agree with you. I think he was one of those players where he was a force multiplier,

but also a force contractor too. When he was bad and that around him was bad, the things like the turnovers, the fumbles, all that kind of stuff was magnified. When things around him were good, then he was amazing. And that's why in 04 he had Robinson at eight touchdowns, Moss at 13 touchdowns. You know, it was just like an absolute avalanche,

embarrassment of riches on the offensive side of the ball. I think too often we're also, when we analyze a player, we're always trying to either put him in the bucket of he's really good and perfect and great at everything, or he's terrible and I hate him and I can't even look at him. Like that seems to be the way that we often analyze sports in general and sports players. And with Culpepper,

what I really like about talking about his story and those years is that it is a roller coaster of Dante Culpepper of the highs are incredibly high. The lows are very low. And he has this fascinating skillset that no quarterback in NFL history has ever had. Randall Cunningham is one of the original running quarterbacks, but Cunningham is a track runner. Culpepper is a linebacker. He was as big as LeVon Kirkland.

I mean, the guy was enormous. Not a linebacker in today's game, a huge old-school linebacker. He would be a defensive end, I think, in the NFL now. And for a guy of his size and stature to even get to the point of playing NFL quarterback, when I'm sure everyone with his athleticism wanted to change positions and things like that, is really quite an accomplishment. And then the way that he did it, barreling over people, the most rushing yards through that time, and the explosive plays and everything else, the arm strength that he had. Sure, there are lots of shortcomings, but in terms of your entertainment value and what you had there, and maybe what he could have potentially grown into, because I think that that section of time after that, say from 05 to 2010, we start to see an adaptation of offenses. And I think that there's a reason why now 25 to 30 teams feel like they have their answer at quarterback.

And even go back to then, you have like Trent Green is the third or fourth best quarterback in the NFL. And there were so fewer great quarterbacks in that time. And they all came from lower pedigree. I mean, you think about the quarterbacks that played in Super Bowls back then. DeLome was a late-round pick. Warner was undrafted. Brady was a sixth-round pick.

I'm trying to think of others. Matt Hasselbeck was a late round pick that that quarterback was just so much different back then and that was sort of where Dante stood out but a guy with his pedigree I mean the Vikings in the Childers era were trying so hard with guys like Brad Johnson, Tarvaris Jackson, Brooks Bollinger uh eventually our friend Sage, Kelly Holcomb. And that was just simply like you wonder if Childress wouldn't have gone so negative on Dante right away. Could that have been a good marriage? Got to tell you about a new sponsor for the show.

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Use the promo code PURPLEINSIDER for free shipping. That is S-O-T-A-S-T-I-C-K.com. Soda Stick, the original Minnesota sports-inspired goods. Code PURPLEINSIDER for free shipping. Yeah, right. I mean, also just, okay, so maybe you end up with kind of like a West Coast type of offense working for Dante Culpepper where his explosive plays were what you had to rely on. But if you kind of reined it in to some extent and then hit on the explosive plays still,

then you probably end up with a better version of Dante Culpepper and the fact that when he gets hurt, he's not very old. So if you were talking about somebody who could have played until 2015 or beyond that, considering when he started, I mean, there are guys who were in the league then who are still playing now. Maybe with his physical style of play, he would have not lasted quite as long. But with quarterbacks lasting much longer into their careers, you could have seen him, had he not gotten hurt, being able to execute an offense that would give him easier plays

and then still those opportunities to go deep that I think became really popular right after that because that early 2000s is not different from the late 80s when the way that people were playing football. And then it goes like the late 90s is where this shift starts to come, but still people are trying to throw down the field a lot. And then it starts to change a little bit after that. Well, and now we even see when you look at like a Kansas City Chiefs team, it's exactly what you're describing.

Andy Reid builds the infrastructure from the homes to get easy wins all the time. But he's so talented that when things break down, he's able to make the play that won't nobody else make, right, as Randy Moss would say. You know, so that's kind of a really, like, good symbol. Like, is Dante as good as Mahomes? No, but he had the good arm. He had the athleticism.

He had, you know, the question about whether Moss was a crutch or not. But it's really interesting to think about that because a lot of the quarterbacks in today's game, the Matt Ryans, the Matthew Staffords, you wonder if they have that second gear, if you will. Dante had it. It's just a consistency issue and a support issue. I would also like to add about the Randy

Moss thing that even Tom Brady, largely considered the best quarterback of all time, goes from throwing like 20 touchdowns to like 50 touchdowns when he gets Randy Moss. So I don't think you can ding somebody for succeeding with Randy Moss because that's just what he did for everybody, including one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time. So we're talking about just how offenses change and things like that. You wrote a great article about offensive coordinators and systems, and Pro Football Focus has been looking into innovators and things like that, and your analysis has dove in, dived deep into that. Let's talk about that for a minute as

it pertains to the Minnesota Vikings now, because they have one of the most old school style offenses with Gary Kubiak and one of the oldest offensive coordinators in the NFL. But last year, we saw an offense that was creative and different. There are very few that were using fullbacks and extra tight ends and things like that. I thought Kevin Stefanski added a lot of wrinkles with motions and other things that would give indicators to Kirk Cousins for coverages and so forth. So how does that carry over?

We hear from players all the time, well, you know, that second year in the system, that's when it's really good. Now, it just always sounded like player speak to me, but you actually investigated that. Yeah, and it is mostly player speak. I mean, the hard part is that it's hard to untangle just statistical regression in general. So, as you know, if you're a Vikings fan, you've looked at the team over the past half a decade. You know, they were, you know, decent offensively in 2014. They got a little worse in 2015. 2016, they were not quite good.

2017, they rebound. Now, did they rebound in 2017 because Pat Shermer was in his, like, first and a half year? Or did they rebound because, generally speaking, what goes up must come down and vice versa? So, and then 2018, they struggled. 2019, they get better. Is that because John DeFilippo into Kubiak Stefanski?

And those are really good questions to have. What I found is that there is some signal, even beyond what we would expect from regression alone, in changing play callers, but not only changing play callers, but changing scheme. And one of the things that you can do is essentially, you know, and this is sort of a math thing, but like, if you think about taking a team's like rate of different personnel groups, rate of run concepts, rate of routes, and that kind of thing, and you project it into the clouds, how different a team is is how far away they are. And how far away you are from year to year is sort of this idea of how much your scheme has changed. And the Vikings changed a lot from last season.

And as a result, or partially as a result, they became a much better offense. The hard part about the year two thing, though, is that it's much like Bill's fans talking about Josh Allen. If you've already increased a lot from one year to the next, things don't just always go up. Generally speaking, there's a little bit of hitting your head on the glass and coming down a little bit from year to year. So in the case of the Detroit Lions, for example, who I wrote the piece about, I can see an increase from one year to the next because they struggled in the second half of the year. For a team like Minnesota, I'm less enthusiastic about saying, okay,

the second year in this new system is going to gain even higher results because we've already seen a drastic increase from one year to the next. It's really hard to repeat that. Yeah, I think about like Kirk Cousins in general is the center of this. And in 2018, he was put in a system that just didn't fit for him. And he was asked to go in the shotgun and make all these changes at the line of scrimmage and check on this, check on this, check on this and everything else. And that didn't really fit with what he does. It kept him in a straight

drop back far too often for someone who's really terrific when it comes to rolling out. I mean, he was, as you and I talked about at one point during last season, the best quarterback at the NFL at rolling to his left and throwing the ball on the run, like spinning around and throwing it deep. And people will remember the Adam Thielen touchdown where Thielen got hurt. It's an incredible throw by Kirk Cousins rolling away. He's got time, he can set, and he's accurate when he has Cousins rolling away. He's got time, he can set, and he's accurate when he has time to set. But if he's sitting there, sitting duck in the shotgun, and the pressure just comes right in and collapses on him, that's a lot more difficult.

He's also not the most accurate on like those quick throws where you have to catch and throw. And that's what John DiFilippo had him doing all the time. So there's something to putting him in the right situation. But when you look at his career, if he was a baseball player, he would have been a.275 hitter for most years, maybe.271 a year, maybe.280 another year. And last year he hit over.300. And if you saw that in baseball.

He was 2000 and what year? 2009 Jason Kubel. Jason Kubel. Yeah, that's right. What did he hit, like 330 that year or something? He had an amazing 2009 year, and then in 2010, he was butt. It was like, and you split the difference. He's a 275 hitter, which is literally what he is.

But he hit 300 one year, got some MVP votes. In 2010, he hit 250. And I remember, and this is a funny thing to think about, is we only break things into single seasons. i remember in the book scorecasting they talk about if you took a number of different baseball players from say june to the following may they would have hit 60 home runs so there was a a good chance that eventually someone would hit 60 home runs i know the steroid thing but that there had been other samples of 162 games where people hit that many home runs.

They had just never done it in that section. So that kind of reminds me. Endpoints are a really funny thing to mess with statistically. You know, you can make sort of anything work with them, right? You know, this guy is X and X over the last two and a half games type of thing. That is analytics 101 there is arbitrary endpoints.

You should always be a little bit wary. Hey, over the last four games, this guy was this. And you're like, well, okay. What about the other games? Maybe they played Detroit, New York, and Philadelphia, and who was the last team the Vikings played on that stretch? Where Cousins was the best quarterback in the league. You know, like that, yeah.

And so in the Jason Kubel thing, like we, you know, with respect to Cousins, like, okay, so what happens this year? Well, what are some of the things that were conducive to Cousins being able to take advantage of that offense in 2019? Well, the Vikings played a pretty easy schedule last year. You know, they had Brandon Allen on the schedule. They had Chase Daniel on the schedule. They had Matt Moore on the schedule.

They had David Blau on the schedule. You know, the AFC West was down, except for the Chiefs, and even the Vikings got their backup quarterback. And when you're playing ahead or you're playing neutral game scripts, West was down, except for the Chiefs, and even the Vikings got their back at quarterback. And when you're playing ahead or you're playing neutral game scripts all the time, you can go into 21 personnel at will, run play action, run the football, run more on early downs, give Cousins that sort of mental break. When it's more like 2018, and we talked about this going into the year,

you know, part of it was scheme, but part of it was the fact that the Vikings were trailing in games against LA. They were trailing against, in games against New England. They were trailing in games like the New Orleans game. And when that happens, you can't play those style, that style of football as frequently. And it doesn't take that much of a change, five percentage points of plays, ten percentage points of plays, to really make a difference. And that's, you know, when you're looking at the Vikings going into the season, the Kirk regression could happen, and Kirk could be a better quarterback,

and we might still see a small dip in his performance just based upon things that he doesn't have a ton of control over. Yeah, this is something that Cousins is very aware of and has mentioned a couple of times, that there are games and situations where he feels like he played the way that he wanted to play and it didn't work out because of whatever the circumstances were. And that Los Angeles game is a great example. He played about as well as you can play, makes one mistake at the end and they lose, and the defense gives Jared Goff a perfect

quarterback rating. Another thing that I'm curious about your opinion, if the defense regresses, which I think it will have to with rookie cornerbacks or unproven cornerbacks, those are usually the biggest determining factor for how good your defense is, is how well your secondary plays. And Everson Griffin not being there is, as you like to say, not trivial. One of the best players in the NFL over the last five years. And this is a guy now who is going to sign somewhere else. And there are other players that they like. But trying to replace someone who's truly special at their job

and who plays about 80% or 90% of plays. There are very few guys in the NFL who do that like Everson Griffin, so now you're trying to mix and match and rotate and things like that. So your pressure probably goes down. Your secondary play, at least at the safety positions, was great, but it might be somewhat stable, but you still have other players who are adjusting to new jobs. You don't have Mackenzie Alexander there anymore.

How would it affect Cousins' performance to be in shootouts as opposed to games where, like you said, a lot of times they're ahead and they're running the ball to wind down the clock after getting a few big plays through the passing game? I mean, I think it'll kind of mirror what you saw in 2018 versus what you saw in 2019. I mean, I think people were very pleased with what they saw with Cousins in 2019, but his volume statistics, you know, we make light of this now, but back a year ago, everybody that was a Kirk fan was talking about how many 4,000-yard seasons, how many 30-touchdown seasons he had.

He was neither one of those last year, and he played great. You know, he played great. So what we might see is an increase in his statistics but a decrease in the team effectiveness. And, you know, that's the question that you really have to ask yourself. The Vikings wanted Cousins because he was capable of competing in a game where the other team's quarterback has a perfect pass rating. The Vikings were in that football game, and if he didn't fumble at the end,

they probably would have had a chance to go and tie it. Is Kirk worth it if all of your games are playing from ahead? No, we've seen Tavares Jackson go 8-2 in a season where the defense is great. We've seen our friend Gus Farratt go 8-3 in a season where the defense played great and the running game was great. It's a really tricky one, right? Like, I think he'll be valuable this year, and we'll see his value in the sense that they're not going to be as good of a team.

They'll still be competitive, whereas all those quarterbacks I just mentioned, when your team's not competitive, you're really not competitive. You're in the 3-13 category. I think the Vikings, they might be 6-10 this year, but they might be 7-9 for a lot of things that have nothing to do with Kirk. And Kirk's going to keep them in games, but probably not going to be good enough to elevate him over some of the quarterbacks that are on that schedule, like Matt Ryan, Tom Brady, Drew Brees, Stafford twice, Rodgers twice, all that kind of stuff. All right, before we continue the discussion, I have to tell you about BetOnline.

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are, including the schedule, including how their defense plays, how their running game is, how their weapons are around them, the offensive scheme. Those things in the past, of course, affected quarterbacks. But there are guys who are really good and really effective at certain times whose play will dip a little bit if some of those things change, even the littlest bit. And I wonder how you think that Gary Kubiak can stay ahead of it because he's run the same offense for a long time. But I think he's so good at it.

It would almost be like a musician who plays the same type of genre for 40 years, but they're really good at it. So you want to listen to their new song. I think of that the same way with Kubiak, that he's probably always advancing his offense, but he also knows what works, when to call what, how to teach it, all the precise details of that sort of thing, as opposed to someone who is less experienced like John DeFilippo,

who is essentially trying all of it for the first time. You have the most proven offensive coordinator in the league. How does he innovate? How does he stay a little bit ahead of what you know might be coming in regression? Yeah. I mean, cause we've seen in Vikings lure Norv Turner,

you know, he didn't change a whole lot despite the fact that his personnel really begged him to, you know, D Filippo is a different cap, but yeah, you look at, you look at Kubiak and you know, what has Shanahan done with that offense to make it better? Well, they've incorporated the jet sweep stuff. They've incorporated, you know, a decent amount of, of different run concepts other than just the zone running scheme.

The Vikings didn't do that a lot last year. And I wonder, you know, are they going to? Because they don't have a ton of talent at the receiver position aside from Adam Thielen. Their talent is more in that sort of Washington team from 2016 way where they got, you know, a really athletic tight end, Irv Smith and a solid player in Kyle Rudolph at the other spot, you know, one good wide receiver, one young guy. I think it's – there's not going to be a ton of innovation there. It's really going to have to be Kubiak dialing up the sequences

to make sure that they're still efficient. Okay, last thing for you. ESPN put out their football power index. Like, yeah, right? And football power index. And so on our website, Purple Insider, I did 10 takeaways about the power index because that's what you do. And one of the biggest takeaways in particular was how many NFC teams are

listed toward the top. And then, of course, the Vikings play numerous of these NFC teams. So you've got San Francisco was third on their list, New Orleans fourth, Dallas fifth, Philly sixth, Seattle seventh, and Tampa Bay eighth. Tell me if you disagree with any of those. But a lot of them end up on the Vikings schedule, and it really points to being more difficult. But then you have the AFC South, which is on the Vikings schedule as well,

and they're hard to find on the power index. You need some binoculars to seek out the AFC South on the power index. So what are we to make of something like a power index and what it says about the Vikings schedule? Yeah, and we have one ourselves. I mean, I think we're a little bit higher, for example, on Tennessee because they're, you know, you're talking about Arthur Smith, second year as an offensive coordinator. Not that they're going to get better, but if they just stay simply as efficient

as they were when they had, you know, Ryan Tannehill in, I think they'll be a threat, and I think their defense obviously got better, you know, in the offseason as well. So we like them, I think, a little bit more. We're a little lower on just teams that have to have some things go right for it to be good. Like the Minnesota Vikings need – they don't need all 15 rookies to do well, but they need some subset of those rookies to do well, and it's just going to be harder this year than it is most years.

Seattle is very dependent upon their quarterback and won a lot of close games. I don't think that they're a top 10 team in the NFL, even with Russell Wilson being the second best quarterback in the league. Philadelphia and Dallas are sort of the same thing where every single year there's always something. And I think Philadelphia is a little bit too inefficient offensively for me to buy in. I do like the Dallas hype, although five is pretty high. I do agree though with the overall premise

that the AFC is two really big powerhouses and then after that it's kind of dicey, but even if you look at the Vikings schedule, the AFC South, you have Phillip Rivers on the schedule. You have Tannehill, who as good as Kirk was last year, Tannehill was better. Deshaun Watson, who's one of the rising stars in the NFL. And I think they'll, even though Bill O'Brien has sort of made a mockery of his GM ability over the last few months,

I think he's actually a pretty good coach, and they'll be better than their win total of seven and a half this year. So I don't know, man. Like, that's the thing. When I take that, when I take away from that is the Vikings are going to have a really tough road this year. And I'm starting to see there's a lot of betting interest in them winning the NFC North. I think they are the favorite now.

And I fundamentally reject that notion as much as, you know, Vikings fans want to be optimistic after a great draft. So you don't agree then with the FPI that has them at 54% to make the playoffs and the Packers at only 43%. I was a little surprised by that. And Detroit was the 28th ranked team on this list. And that one I just don't understand. I think Detroit should be quite a bit better than that. I don't think they're in a tank for Trevor mode. No, Detroit. So here's the thing about Green Bay relative to Minnesota. Green Bay

was not a 13-win team last year, but the Vikings were also not a 10-win team last year. So both of those teams are far closer to the middle of the pack than we want to give them credit for. And as much as people don't like the Packers approach to the draft, the impact of the 2020 draft is going to be seen in a couple years. If you're a Vikings fan, you should be optimistic about the trajectory of the team relative to Green Bay. But in 2020, you're not going to see it as explicitly as you're going to see it in subsequent years. So we have Green Bay as the favorite, but they're not overwhelmingly so to win the, I think they're like 36% to win the NFC North. The Vikings are 31%.

Detroit and Chicago are teams that have a shot. I mean, Detroit was in the NFC North hunt before Stafford got hurt, and Chicago is just a year removed away from being a 12-4 football team with a quarterback that's no better than the one they have right now in Nick Foles. So it's people, people want to bury teams after one bad season. And I think if anything's an indication, last season's NFC title game teams, San Francisco and Green Bay want to combine 10 games the year before. And so the first seven games for Matt Stafford, they were three, three and one. He led the NFL in touchdown passes.

Exactly. And they were undefeated. They were two. They lost the game at home to Kansas City on a fumble return for a touchdown. That was controversial. They lost the game on the road in Green Bay on Monday Night Football where it was basically the referees that gave Green Bay the game. You know, the Minnesota game, the Vikings beat them fair and square.

But they held with them, right? They went toe-for-toe with them in terms of scores. Last second loss at Oakland? Last second loss at Oakland. I mean, we're not talking about it. Their defense fell off a cliff, but a lot of that has to do with the fact that when your defense can't be aggressive because you have terrible quarterback play, you force fewer turnovers.

You get fewer sacks. You put Stafford back in there, I think it changes a lot. They're a lot better than the 28th best team in the league in my estimation. Yeah, I would have a tough time believing that a Matt Patricia team is going to go 12-4. But, you know, I mean, we've seen bad coaches succeed at times in small samples before. But he's the big holdup for me is it's really hard to gauge

if he can get a team to even just band together because every player that leaves Detroit is like, what the heck was that? With working with Matt Patricia, he's the big holdup, but they have a lot of other earmarks of a team that is going to rise to some extent. So maybe they end up eight and eight or nine and seven, but that's not a 28th ranked team in the NFL. The other teams that are down there, I think, are totally fine. Washington, New York, Jacksonville, teams like that. Who do you think is number one in the tank for Trevor before we wrap up here? That's a really good question.

I think the team that has the best fundamentals to do it is the Jacksonville Jaguars. It looks like we were big fans of Teddy Bridgewater. I think if Carolina were to have gone with a quarterback less experienced, less sort of more variance, they probably would have been, especially in an NFC South that's going to be really tough with Atlanta, Tampa Bay, and New Orleans. But I see them, you know, being able to compete. I see them winning six or seven games.

Where I look at Jacksonville, all their draft picks were high-variance guys. Their quarterback is a six-round pick, a high-variance guy. And so when I look at that team, to me, that's the team that's tanking for Traver. And they're going to be in a good spot to do so. And putting him on that team and your guy, Doug Mar Marone probably will be gone if that's the case it'll be a fresh start for Jacksonville in 2021 should uh you know they they finish last in the AFC South and and in the overall I love how everyone calls him my guy Doug Marone uh do you like yield for fields if if Justin Fields maybe emerges this year. Negative yields for fields. Negative yields for fields.

That's a pretty good one. Sucking for Justin. No, that doesn't rhyme. Well, okay, we'll have lots of time to figure it out. Eric Eager for Football Focus, the PFF forecast podcast is a must listen. It is on every time I go for a jog in my headphones. So that means every once a week or so. All right. So great stuff, Eric, as always, and we'll catch up again soon. Thanks for having me on.

Hey, this is Megan Rapinoe and I'm Sue Bird. We've decided to turn our crazy IG live show into a podcast for your listening pleasure. Enjoy the show. A Touch More. New episodes of A Touch More drop Tuesday only on the Blue Wire Podcast Network. Be sure to subscribe to the show on Spotify, Apple, or anywhere else you listen to podcasts.